Comments from John Royce (awarded the IASL School Librarianship Award for his promotion of school librarianship and professional development in international schools worldwide.)
18 May 2013 The UK National Literacy Trust yesterday (16 May 2013) published a press release on a study Children’s on-screen reading overtakes reading in print Amongst the study's findings: Children say they prefer to read on screen. Over half (52%) said they would rather read on electronic devices but only a third (32%) would rather read in print. That would not worry me overmuch, I am not a dead-tree Luddite, apart from a further finding: (The study) found those who read daily only on-screen are nearly twice less likely to be above average readers than those who read daily in print or in print and on-screen (15.5% vs 26%). Those who read only on-screen are also three times less likely to enjoy reading very much (12% vs 51%) and a third less likely to have a favourite book (59% vs 77%). Now that, and a recent Scientific American article The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens are concerns. I've just dredged up this quotation from The Bullock Report (A language for life, 1975): Pupils admitted to an adult literacy scheme had been asked to say why, in their opinion, they failed to learn to read at school. 'Only one common factor emerges: they did not learn from the process of learning to read that it was something other people did for pleasure.' p.130.
Digital Libraries
Paperless Public Libraries Switch to Digital 22 May 2013 BBC article by Bill Hicks, on the concept of a "paperless library", sparked off by the announcement of plans to build a digital library in Bexar County, Texas. Hicks gives the motivation behind the concept, as well as including comments and opinons from a global audience.
Deep Reading
The case for preserving the pleasure of deep reading “Deep reading”—as opposed to the often superficial reading we do on the web—is an endangered practice, one we ought to take steps to preserve as we would a historic building or a significant work of art. Its disappearance would imperil the intellectual and emotional development of generations growing up online, as well as the perpetuation of a critical part of our culture: the novels, poems and other kinds of literature that can be appreciated only by readers whose brains, quite literally, have been trained to apprehend them.
Creating a Reading Culture
An Urban Secondary School Establishes a “Reading Culture” In this Teachers College Record article, Chantal Francois (Rutgers University) describes the literacy practices of Grant Street School, a 560-student 6-12 inner-city school that had been mired in abysmally low reading achievement until it adopted balanced literacy practices in 2003, the most important being: -30 minutes of independent reading time every day in which students were encouraged to “lose themselves” in books; -The expectation of up to one hour of independent reading after school hours; -Beefing up the school library (to 11,000 books) and classroom libraries; -Teachers recommending books to individual students, modeling their own enthusiasm for reading, monitoring students’ reading, and making connections to all subject areas; -Book clubs, discussion groups, and author visits; -15-25 percent of students’ overall English grade based on progress in independent reading: quantity of books read (35 a year in grades 6-10 and 25 in grades 11-12), reading habits at home, engagement in class, and experimentation with genres and book difficulty. - The principal frequently visited classrooms and gave teachers feedback on their classroom practice, maintained a library in his office for students to use, attended literacy institutes with teachers, personally assessed students’ reading development, and orchestrated weekly staff meetings by grade, discipline, and as a whole school to discuss instructional practices and students’ progress. The result: Grant Street students’ reading growth was two or three times that of their peers nationally and their reading motivation remained steady while most U.S. students’ motivation declines during adolescence. Francois uses the metaphor of a crawl space to describe what was happening during the independent reading time: “Just as a house’s crawl space is a protected environment through which one can access pipes and other areas that are difficult to reach otherwise,” she says, “Grant Street staff created a safe and protected space for students in reading that enabled them to attain a sense of community, individual agency, and reading development… My analysis suggests that a crawl space existed at Grant Street whereby students had enough breathing room to affirm themselves as readers in a community: they chose the books they wanted to read, formed relationships with each other and with adults about books, and apprenticed one another to read.” “Reading in the Crawl Space: A Study of an Urban School’s Literacy-Focused Community of Practice” by Chantal Francois inTeachers College Record, May 2013 (Vol. 115, #5, p. 1-35), http://www.tcrecord.org/content.asp?contentid=16966
eBooks and Audiobooks
Reading for Pleasure
Reviews
Articles
On-screen vs print reading
Table of Contents
Children's on-screen reading overtakes reading in print
Children’s on-screen reading overtakes reading in print
The Science of paper vs screens
The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens
Comments from John Royce
(awarded the IASL School Librarianship Award for his promotion of school librarianship and professional development in international schools worldwide.)
18 May 2013
The UK National Literacy Trust yesterday (16 May 2013) published a press release on a study Children’s on-screen reading overtakes reading in print
Amongst the study's findings:
Children say they prefer to read on screen. Over half (52%) said they would rather read on electronic devices but only a third (32%) would rather read in print.
That would not worry me overmuch, I am not a dead-tree Luddite, apart from a further finding:
(The study) found those who read daily only on-screen are nearly twice less likely to be above average readers than those who read daily in print or in print and on-screen (15.5% vs 26%). Those who read only on-screen are also three times less likely to enjoy reading very much (12% vs 51%) and a third less likely to have a favourite book (59% vs 77%).
Now that, and a recent Scientific American article The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens are concerns.
I've just dredged up this quotation from The Bullock Report (A language for life, 1975):
Pupils admitted to an adult literacy scheme had been asked to say why, in their opinion, they failed to learn to read at school. 'Only one common factor emerges: they did not learn from the process of learning to read that it was something other people did for pleasure.' p.130.
Digital Libraries
Paperless Public Libraries Switch to Digital
22 May 2013
BBC article by Bill Hicks, on the concept of a "paperless library", sparked off by the announcement of plans to build a digital library in Bexar County, Texas. Hicks gives the motivation behind the concept, as well as including comments and opinons from a global audience.
Deep Reading
The case for preserving the pleasure of deep reading“Deep reading”—as opposed to the often superficial reading we do on the web—is an endangered practice, one we ought to take steps to preserve as we would a historic building or a significant work of art. Its disappearance would imperil the intellectual and emotional development of generations growing up online, as well as the perpetuation of a critical part of our culture: the novels, poems and other kinds of literature that can be appreciated only by readers whose brains, quite literally, have been trained to apprehend them.
Creating a Reading Culture
An Urban Secondary School Establishes a “Reading Culture”In this Teachers College Record article, Chantal Francois (Rutgers University) describes the literacy practices of Grant Street School, a 560-student 6-12 inner-city school that had been mired in abysmally low reading achievement until it adopted balanced literacy practices in 2003, the most important being:
- 30 minutes of independent reading time every day in which students were encouraged to “lose themselves” in books;
- The expectation of up to one hour of independent reading after school hours;
- Beefing up the school library (to 11,000 books) and classroom libraries;
- Teachers recommending books to individual students, modeling their own enthusiasm for reading, monitoring students’ reading, and making connections to all subject areas;
- Book clubs, discussion groups, and author visits;
- 15-25 percent of students’ overall English grade based on progress in independent reading: quantity of books read (35 a year in grades 6-10 and 25 in grades 11-12), reading habits at home, engagement in class, and experimentation with genres and book difficulty.
-
The principal frequently visited classrooms and gave teachers feedback on their classroom practice, maintained a library in his office for students to use, attended literacy institutes with teachers, personally assessed students’ reading development, and orchestrated weekly staff meetings by grade, discipline, and as a whole school to discuss instructional practices and students’ progress. The result: Grant Street students’ reading growth was two or three times that of their peers nationally and their reading motivation remained steady while most U.S. students’ motivation declines during adolescence.
Francois uses the metaphor of a crawl space to describe what was happening during the independent reading time: “Just as a house’s crawl space is a protected environment through which one can access pipes and other areas that are difficult to reach otherwise,” she says, “Grant Street staff created a safe and protected space for students in reading that enabled them to attain a sense of community, individual agency, and reading development… My analysis suggests that a crawl space existed at Grant Street whereby students had enough breathing room to affirm themselves as readers in a community: they chose the books they wanted to read, formed relationships with each other and with adults about books, and apprenticed one another to read.”
“Reading in the Crawl Space: A Study of an Urban School’s Literacy-Focused Community of Practice” by Chantal Francois inTeachers College Record, May 2013 (Vol. 115, #5, p. 1-35),
http://www.tcrecord.org/content.asp?contentid=16966